• 0 Posts
  • 101 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 27th, 2023

help-circle



  • I got started pretty recently!

    I wanted a cheap drawing tablet for taking whiteboard style handwritten notes for a totally different project.

    Decided since I had it I would play around with making some art. I ended up really enjoying it! It’s super relaxing.

    Basically I just have Krita, which is free. Then I’ll take photographs or otherwise source images that I might want to paint, and try to recreate them as a reference. NOT tracing, but having the image side by side with the drawing. I find that to be the best for learning. I’m primarily a musician, and that’s how I was taught to learn music as well (listen to a piece and try to recreate it).

    I checked out a few youtube videos about colors as well. Similar to above, I knew I didn’t want to just use a color picker to match the reference image (and I think the result would be bad anyway). So I watched how oil painters and watercolor people made their colors by eye, and have tried to recreate that process in Krita. This part has been the most fascinating, a lot of times your brain tells you you’re looking at a certain color, but because of shadows and lighting and stuff you have to know to choose a totally different color to produce that effect.

    I’m pretty happy with it and I want to keep practicing so I can hand paint my own album art someday! 30+ too of course, altho now that I know I enjoy it I wish I had started much earlier






  • I have the same mac pictured above, and also a windows laptop with many ports.

    The mac I plug into my work center via a single usb-c connection which charges it, connects it to my external monitor, and connects it to all of my USB equipment (about 6 items ranging from m&k to music equipment). Having only the one wire is huge in terms of making it easier to break down the machine from its setup and pack it up for the road.

    The pc is connected separately to power as it can’t be powered through the usb-c, and to the monitor separately for some esoteric reason. So then I need a third cable to connect it to my equipment.

    So in my case the less-is-more approach is actually preferable

    that all being said

    I’m sure other windows laptops can be configured with a one-wire solution just fine. And I don’t mean to pretend the 2x usb-c config was a popular choice or anything. Only on like two models or something had it. The newer macbooks brought back sd card slots and hdmi and everything by popular demand.

    I looked into it and you can still run everything off of just one usb-c on those ones, so at the end of the day more options is just better for more people






  • Yeah it was a trip for me as well to adapt to the new ways. For example it took me a long long time to adjust to allowing the computer to manage the multitasking for me. I would habitually always close out programs I wasn’t using, because I felt deeply from my decades of experience that running tons of things at once would cause many issues.

    I was very uncomfortable letting all these “active” programs pile up, but it really turned out to be all good. The computers are designed to be used this way. And really, I’m better off for it, not having to go in and micromanage everything constantly.

    What I’m trying to say is that learning is not something that is ever finished, you know? There came a day when we stopped defragmenting our hard drives, and now the day has arrived where the computer utilizes all the ram all the time



  • There’s this dude at the gym who watches netflix on his phone between sets, taking 10+ minute breaks while people wait in line to use the machine.

    I normally try to be charitable about these things. I have no idea if he has some type of fatigue issue or something along those lines justifying the long breaks, right?

    But I need to actively push my thoughts in this direction, in some probably misguided attempt to cultivate kindness within my own life. Truth is there’s just something infuriating about watching a movie while sitting in the building’s only leg extension





  • Google has been rolling out a thing where an AI result is the first thing that pops up, often taking up the whole screen lol. I’ve personally witnessed tons of people google something normally, then just go with whatever the AI says.

    Makes me shake my head, but it’s not like they were very discerning with their sources before all this nonsense, either. Hopefully they don’t rely on it for any important medical advice down the road